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THERE'S a fortunate little pocket of testosterone left in Old
Blighty yet.

Tony Blair, accompanying
Queen Elizabeth II on a tour of
Australia, signed up with a flourish
of manly courage to join George
W. Bush's expedition to clean
Saddam Hussein's plow.

"This is something we've got to
deal with," he told a Queensland
television interviewer, and this time
there won't be any dithering.

Echoing Ari Fleischer, without
excluding himself from the
scolding, the British prime minister
cited "dithering" as enabling
Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda to
escape punishment after they killed 231 persons with bombs
at U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. This
allowed bin Laden and al Qaeda "to prosper and plot the
September 11 attacks."

This time, presumably, there won't be a rebuke from the
White House for stating the impolitic obvious, that Bill Clinton
dithered while his pants rested at ease around his ankles,
although Condoleezza Rice, the president's No. 1 tough guy,
took diplomatic pains yesterday to say that "the president has
made no decision about the use of force against Iraq." But as
part of the one step forward, two steps to the side strategy of
waiting while European allies take time to recover from the
attack of "the vapors," as diagnosed last month by Secretary
of State Colin Powell, Miss Rice made sure no one lost the
point of the exercise: "[Saddam´s] a threat to his neighbors,
to the world, to his own people."

Mr. Blair said he would come to Washington just after
Easter to confer with George W. over "the second stage" of
the war on terror, and Britons traveling with the prime
minister said his remarkably strong language seemed designed
to tell Saddam Hussein that patience in London and
Washington is just about exhausted. If he doesn't allow
United Nations weapons inspectors into Iraq to resume the
work so rudely interrupted three years ago, consequences
have to be faced.

"Iraq is in breach of all conditions of weapons inspectors,"
Mr. Blair told his interviewer Down Under. "We know they
are trying to accumulate weapons of mass destruction. We
know Saddam has used them against his own people. How
we deal with this is a matter we must discuss, and find the
best way to deal with it."

As if that were not enough red meat for Englishmen, Mr.
Blair had a warning for a second villain of George W.'s axis
of evil. "North Korea is spending billions on developing
weapons of mass destruction and nuclear capability while
some of its people are starving.

"For 10 years Afghanistan was like this but we did not do
anything. There would not have been the consent to do
anything. Even when they killed those people in the embassy
in Dar es Salaam and there was terror around the world there
was not the sense of urgency that we had to deal with it -
but it may have been better to have had the foresight to deal
with it then.

"This is not something that just America is talking about.
This is something we have got to deal with. If chemical,
biological or nuclear capability fell into the wrong hands and if
we did not act, we might find out too late the potential for
destruction."

Upon what meat, one of Old Blighty's better scribblers
might ask, doth our mighty Caesar feed? His resolve is all the
more remarkable because he will pay a price at home for it.
His Labor Party backbenchers, who imagine that the
government's job is to bottle and burp their constituents until
the very instant everything blows up, have warned him that
they have no appetite for military action against Iraq. One
senior Labor member denounced Mr. Blair's "warmongering
propensities" and is expected to turn up the volume in a
House of Commons debate on Mr. Blair's return to London
later this week. Tony Blair's steadfast support of the
American campaign to rid the world of terrorists who seek to
blow up the world is all the more remarkable because
frightened and complacent Europeans desperately want only
to stop the world and get off.

Some of the vapors that enveloped the continent as the
shock of September 11 wore off have drifted across some of
the leftmost precincts of the sceptr'd isle, particularly the
precincts made of ether and newsprint, whose patron saint is
Alfred E. Neumann of Mad magazine: "What? Me worry?"

One pundit, writing in the Manchester Guardian, the
bloodless tribune of the weak and the whining, mocks Mr.
Blair's warning that Saddam, with his arsenal of chemicals,
bombs and bugs, is a clear and present danger with
"weapons that threaten the world." A man who wants to
discipline the ravenous appetites of the welfare state clearly
can't be trusted on the smaller matter of survival. The
testosterone arrived just in
time.